I Get So ‘Emotional’ Baby, Every Time I Think Of Who

Matt Smith as The Doctor and Karen Gillan as Amy Pond in Doctor Who.

As you’ll know if you’ve already read my review of Night Terrors (which you can find here if you haven’t), it was at this point that I decided that I didn’t really want to do any more reviews of Doctor Who for a while. Fun At One, my book about comedy on BBC Radio 1 (still available from here, radio comedy fans), was about to come out and I imagined that a good deal of my time would be taken up with promoting and talking and writing about that. As it happened – pun very much intended – events took a very different course for reasons way beyond my control, but you can find out more about that here. If I’m honest, though, I needed a bit of a break from all things Matt Smith-related; as you may have noticed if you have been following these repurposed reviews, I wasn’t really enjoying the episodes themselves as much, let alone writing about them, and indeed the reviews had started to feel like a bit of a chore. I did still watch Doctor Who and I did still have opinions, however, and sometimes they found their way into the ‘columns’ I that I was writing in various places. One particular dominant aspect of Doctor Who at that point irked me so intensely that I eventually wrote this reaction to it, which originally opened with the fact that while Google found 1,100,000 results for ‘amy pond crying’ in 0.56 seconds, it found precisely none for ‘primeval dinosaur crying’. Incidentally, there’s a lot more of this sort of writing – and a lot more on Doctor Who full stop – in my book Not On Your Telly, a collection of columns and features which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here. Hint hint.

This Saturday – as you might have noticed from the one or two people casually mentioning it in passing on Twitter – Doctor Who is back, back, back, for a new series of adventures ahead of a hugely-hyped fiftieth anniversary special. An occasion that is somewhat slightly daunting for those of us who sat through Keff McCulloch’s interminable The Brain on The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album.

While the big whizzbang repeats-ahoy anniversary hoedown won’t really hit until November, and you won’t be seeing any Distinguished Service Order for David J. Howe or street parades with giant inflatable Voord and Raymond Cusicks just yet, it’s a fair bet that quite a few people will choose to mark the occasion with a rewatch of that first ever episode of Doctor Who, with its celebrated eerie schoolroom and junkyard shenanigans, pioneering use of electronic music and video effects, Kenneth Williams-faced extras pulling faces at photos of Frank Ifield, and teenagers handjiving to the most unreasonable non-copyright Shadows facsimile instrumental imaginable. If any of them then venture on to the second ever episode, they’ll witness a wonderful moment where William Hartnell – one of the finest actors ever to grace the small screen, and don’t you listen to any of that twaddle about him getting lines wrong all the time which was probably largely deliberate anyway – steps outside the Tardis and suddenly looks deeply concerned, muttering to himself “it’s still a Police Box… why hasn’t it changed?”. That, really, was about as close as old-skool Doctor Who got to an emotional outpouring for, well, pretty much most of it.

Sceptical? Well, take a look at a couple of the other big ‘event’ episodes of the sixties. When William Hartnell regenerates into Patrick Troughton, do his two young fellow travellers – whom it’s already been established have some sort of a relationship; they did meet The Doctor while they were on a date, after all – use this as an opportunity to have an impassioned debate about how this might affect what schools their theoretical children get into? No, they spend the lion’s share of an entire episode spluttering about whether they really just saw that happen and speculating on whether this ‘Chaplinesque’ figure might be an impostor who’s imprisoned the real Doctor somewhere. When it’s time to say goodbye in turn to the second Doctor, and his slightly newer two young fellow travellers have their memories of him erased by the Time Lords, are there any lingering close-ups of tears being fought back or emotionally overwrought speeches that overstay their welcome? No there certainly aren’t, and what really resonates for the viewer is The Doctor spinning away into the centre of the screen, still arguing with his accusers as he goes. It didn’t end with the final black and white episode either; throughout the entire existence of Doctor Who, there may have been plenty of emotional moments, but they have always been just that – moments. Nobody could argue about the punch-packing impact of, say, the end of The Caves Of Androzani, the end of The Green Death, or even the end of Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday for that matter, but they’ve always been short, concise and heavy on impact; sometimes, in fact, in many cases, they have even been largely wordless.

Nowadays, however, you’re more likely to see episodes of Doctor Who almost entirely given over to the companions blubbing like a contestant on The X Factor relating their ‘journey’, and going ‘O Tempora, O Mores’ about a Judoon falling over or something, while the actual title character of the series seems to be getting smaller and smaller amounts of screen time, and even then usually ends up joining in with the sobbing too. Take a look at the average review of any recent episode, and chances are you will find the word ‘emotional’ being used before too long, which suggests that a lot of people actually enjoy the bawl-friendly bias. Well, if you do like it, good for you, but what about the rest of us who fail to see what’s so wrong exactly about a man chasing some monsters – which, in case you’ve forgotten, is exactly how the revived series started? It’s no wonder they brought Primeval back.

So yes, this new run of episodes. By all means let’s still have ‘emotional’ bits, but please can we have a bit of balance back too, before we end up with the sodding Weeping Angels ‘sharing’ their ‘story’ with Heat.

Some things that might need explaining…

I am a huge defender of Keff McCulloch’s musical contributions to Doctor Who and am very fond indeed of The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album, but that cut-and-shut collection of tune-deficient orchestra hits that masqueraded as The Brain? You’re on your own there.

David J. Howe is a pioneering Doctor Who fan writer and researcher. Poor old Raymond Cusick was a BBC employee who essentially got little more than an ex-gratia payment of a packet of Extra Strong Mints for designing the Daleks; The Voord were another of his designs who were supposed to ‘rival’ The Daleks but didn’t. I think this bit of whimsy may have its roots in a spoof news article I did for a Doctor Who fanzine so long ago that I can’t even remember which one it was.

Although I was already very publically calling for a female Doctor back then – as you can hear more about in my chat about Doctor Who on The Zeitgeist Tapes here – my entirely innocent reference to ‘a man chasing some monsters’ reads very oddly now. But that’s progress.

Alex Kingston as River Song in Doctor Who.

Buy A Book!

Not On Your Telly is a collection of columns and features with a slant towards ‘forgotten’ television, including plenty related to Doctor Who. Not On Your Telly is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. Although I won’t get ’emotional’ if you don’t.

Further Listening

You can hear me talking to Emma Burnell and Steve Fielding about politics and Doctor Who in The Zeitgeist Tapes – the show where politics and pop culture collide – here.